Spurious

What Matters Most

'Philosophy bears upon what matters most', says W. with great urgency, remembering Plotinus. 'What matters most to you?', asks W. 'Your dinner? Alcohol? Chav mags?'

What matters most, W. muses, are the coming End Times. The ecological disaster and the financial disaster. - 'They're nearly upon us', he says. 'Are you ready for the End Times?' Is he? Least of all him, W. says. Least of all us. 

We'll be the first to go under, W. says. The very first. He'll welcome it, says W., as judgement for our miserable lives and the immensity of our failure.

Delaying the Messiah

W. sends me some quotes from his reading from the Talmud.

Seven things are hidden from men. These are the day of death, the day of consolation, the depth of judgement; no man knows what is in the mind of his friend; no man knows which of his business ventures will be profitable, or when the kingdom of the house of David will be restored, or when the sinful kingdom will fail.

W. likes lists, he says. It's a Borges thing.

This one especially for you, he says:

Proselytes and those that emit semen to no purpose delay the Messiah.

For how long have you personally delayed the coming of the Messiah?, says W. Years? Millennia?

Actually, W. says, the explanation is that during the second destruction of the temple, the Romans persecuted the Jews, prohibiting against circumcision and so on. The people despaired and thought there was no point bringing children into the world, so they would masturbate or marry young girls who could not have children. But the rabbis said that if the souls that are stored in heaven from the beginning of creation never come into the world through the birth of children, then the Messiah would not come.

Decline

W.'s amazed at his decline. He works only a couple of hours a day, getting up before dawn, reading and writing before going to work. - I used to work night and day, he tells me. All I had in my room was a desk and a bed. When did the decline begin?

There were several stages, says W. As an undergraduate, he worked hard and showed great promise. He commanded respect from his peers and much was expected of him. Then came his postgraduate years, the slow fall. But he still managed to learn Hebrew! He still learned classical guitar!

What happened then? asks W. He has no name for it, W. says. A general malaise. A kind of collapse. In part, says W., it was Kafka's fault. How could he, W., write anything as good? He kept notebook after notebook, W. says, before giving them away.

He no longer had an alibi, W. says. He couldn't hold them apart any longer: the writer he wanted to be, and the person he was. It happened with literature for him, W. says, and then it happened in philosophy, which was terrible.

His turn to philosophy was in some way his way of escaping literature, W. says. Didn't philosophy hold out the possibility of a Kant-like flowering of one's powers much later in life? And there was his dawning sense of the apocalypse, too, W. says, of the end of the world.

And the sense that the highest task was of countering the apocalypse, which might indeed be a task of thought, of philosophy, W says. A task for which he discovered himself to be singularly unfitted, which made the distance between the philosopher he wanted to be and the person he was yet more unbearable.

It's was all Rosenzweig's fault!, says W. And Cohen's. All those declarative sentences! All that mathematics! How could he ever approach their brilliance? He fills notebook after notebook, but it's all futile. What is there for him to do in the teeth of the apocalypse? What relationship can he have to the highest that must be thought?

Then he met me, W. says, and things got really bad.

Inadequacy

Above all, W. says, I should work earnestly on another book. It's the only way I experience my own inadequacy, he says. He knows me: without some project, I'll become far too content. My idiocy will become an alibi, an excuse - which is precisely a way to avoid it altogether. You have to run up against your idiocy, to plunge into it, W. says. Nothing can begin unless you experience your idiocy.

Free Fall

We're in free fall, says W. Or Limbo. We must have committed some terrible crime in a former life. We've been reborn into the wrong bodies at the wrong time, that's what you Hindus think, isn't it?

This is our purgatory, W. says, or perhaps it's just his. Perhaps I am his purgatory, says W., and I am his Limbo. Perhaps his friendship for me is only punishment for some great crime he committed in a former life, he's not sure what.

Army Postcards

Rosenzweig wrote the entirety of The Star of Redemption on postcards to his mother, W. says. All of it, every line, from the Macedonian front, where he was fighting. Admittedly, there wasn't much to do at the Macednoian front - that's not where the big battles were, but nevertheless. An entire book! Written on postcards! One after another! To his mother!, W says.

Rosenzweig! He's the measure of all things to us. The measure of seriousness. The measure of commitment ('he meant every word'!). The measure of acumen. The measure of religiosity. The measure of integrity. He turned his back on the university, says W. He devised a new form of educational institution! He lived what he thought. He acted on what he thought, which is inconcievable to us now.

Rosenzweig is a guiding star to us, burning brightly above everything. He's our inspiration. To write like him! Wholly in declarative sentences! To let your thought flash out! To write in sentences like bolts of lightning! Imagine him, Rosenzweig, at the Macedonian front, says W. Imagine, shells falling around him. Imagine, in the trenches (were there any trenches in Macedonia?) propped up against a dirt wall, writing another postcard to his mother.

Dear mother, he would write, and then off he'd go, W. says. Dear mother, and then he'd write his thoughts about God or death or Judaism horizontally, in the space left for you to write, and then vertically, as they used to do in the nineteenth century, using every part of the page. Sentences like lightning bolts. Thoughts swift and certain and sure, the shells falling around him (was the Macedonian front bombarded?)

He might die at any moment! A shell might fall and explode then and there! But he's writing horizontally, then vertically and then slantwise across his postcard. What do you think it showed on the front?, I ask W. What view did it show? - Nothing, you idiot, says W. It was an army postcard. Probably some artillery. Or a tank or something. Did they have tanks in the first world war?

By the time The Star of Redemption was published, he'd already left the university, W. says. He'd left it behind! He'd founded a new kind of establishment! He was educating young Jews, says W. Including Kafka. Did you know he taught Kafka?, W. says. Well he did. Rosenzweig taught Kafka. Which is quite extraordinary, when you think about it. Kafka and Rosenzweig, in the same room as one another. The younger man, the older man. Teacher and pupil.

The Occasion of Thought

Thought! cries W. What does it mean to think? Why can't we think? Why are we so singularly incapable of thinking? We've cultivate the external signs of thinking, W. says. We can do good impressions of thinkers, W. says, but weren't not thinkers! We've failed at the level of thought!

He knows they're out there, W. says, real thinkers. He knows how natural it is for them, how they glide through the milieu of thinking like a whale through deep water. it's effortless! it's as natural as breathing! they're used to thought, they're fully confident of their ability to think, which might as well be God-given.

They can't help it! They couldn't do otherwise! Thought is their element, their milieu, W. says, just as idiocy is our element and our milieu. They are virtuosos of thinking just as we are virtuosos of idiocy. Do you think they envy us as we envy them? Do you think they even know of the existence of idiocy? They don't know of it and they don't believe in it. They don't need to. Thought is not the absence of idiocy, although idiocy is the absence of thought.

W. and I remember our leaders. Do you think they had a sense of our idiocy? Was it real for them? Did it confuse or confound them? Did it prevent them from thinking? Not at all. Not for a moment. We bothered them, there was no question of that.

Do you remember how he spoke?, of the first leader. His seriousness? He wasn't swayed by us. Our idiocy was annulled. Just for a moment, we were quiet. Just for a moment, idiocy was interrupted and we were calmed. It was marvellous, W. said.

And our second leader. Do you remember what he told us? How he'd dropped out of college. How he'd worked as a pastry chef. How he'd taken up boxing - and all in the name of thought. All because he felt himself unworthy of thought, and tried to turn away from it, but there it was nonetheless: thought. There it was, waiting for him, the most natural thing in the world: the capacity to think.

There was no presumptiousness about him, we both agree. Thought was natural to him, it didn't surprise him and nor did it give him any sense of distinction. He was just like us, we agree, except that he could think. Which means he wasn't at all like us, really.

And our third Leader, perhaps the greatest of them all! Do you  remember how quiet she was? Do you remember how silent the room became, and how we leaned in to listen more closely?

We thought were party to something, we remember. We thought we were in on a Secret, that now, at last, thinking would be here, in person. We though we would be par with it, the emergence of a thought. It was terribly flattering. We were, for once, to be the occasion of thought, rather than its obstacle. Thought had been very close to us that afternoon, hadn't it? Maybe we even believed we could think, which is the greatest illusion.